Following an autopsy Saturday, Lehigh County Coroner Scott Grim said Tamara died from blunt force trauma. He ruled the death accidental.

Witnesses said they saw a window screen fall to the ground, then the children. A small, child-sized chair could be seen in the window of the apartment building.

On Saturday evening, friends and neighbors held a vigil at the site of the accident, where a collection of flowers, balloons, stuffed animals and votive candles had mounted over the course of the day. People held hands, prayed and sang songs. They also passed a plastic jar to collect donations for the girls' family.

Two Allentown girls fall from fourth floor window at Seventh and Turner Streets in Allentown.

(Chris Shipley/The Morning Call)

Among those in attendance were Edward and Abigail Denis, who have lived with their two children in the apartment next door to the girls for about a year.

"We all live here together," Edward Denis said. "I look at it as we are all family."

"She was just your typical, happy 3-year-old," Abigail Denis said of Tamara.

On Saturday morning, a steady stream of people filed past the apartment building. Many did not know the family but felt compelled to offer condolences.

The apartment the children fell from is one of 12 units in the five-story building that provides housing for once-homeless families pursuing educational or vocational training. A convenience store is on the ground floor. Several apartment windows had no screens and in units that did, some screens appeared loose or worn Saturday.

Under Allentown's Property Rehabilitation and Maintenance Code, landlords are not required to provide screens.

The building is part of the Transitional Housing Program for the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley and is owned by Valley Housing Development Corp., a nonprofit affordable housing group that is based in Emmaus and contracts with the Lehigh County Housing Authority for staffing and operational support.

Speaking generally, Dan Beers, who is the executive director of both Valley Housing and the Housing Authority, said Friday that maintenance crews try to address window security, but sometimes tenants remove the safety measures.

He said the city prohibits any barring of windows because that would prevent rescue crews from getting in during an emergency. Instead, he said, whenever an apartment is vacated, maintenance crews make sure blocks are in place to stop the windows from opening past a certain point.

"That's maintenance protocol," he said.

But Beers said that when he visited the girls' apartment Friday night, the blocks were missing from the window the children fell out of. The adjacent window in their apartment had blocks, he noticed.

Beers said Valley Housing will be investigating what, if anything, can be done to make the apartments safer.

At the vigil, Paulette Elliott called on mourners to channel their grief into something productive. She urged them to demand safer windows.

She said she used to live in New York City, where window guards are standard. The guards, she said, cover the lower portions of window openings, making it unlikely that a child could accidentally fall out.

"I never experienced buildings like this," she said. "They don't have any [guards] here, and I think this is a shame."

Ross Marcus, CACLV's deputy director, said, "We're going to take a step back once we get more information and try to figure out what additional precautions should be taken, if any."

Marcus said he had spoken to the children's mother but declined to give details, saying he wanted to respect the family's privacy.

"This is a parent's worst nightmare," he said.

Many current and former program participants have reached out and offered help to the family, Marcus said.

"They have really rallied around the program and this family," he said.